Locals donate handmade blankets to sick children

Saturday

LYNN HAVEN — With the help of locals, one organization has warmed the hearts of about 300 sick children.

LYNN HAVEN — With the help of locals, one organization has warmed the hearts of about 300 sick children.

Project Linus of Bay County held its annual Make a Blanket Day for Project Linus Saturday. The event, held at Jim’s Vacuum and Sewing on State 77, called for community members to submit handmade blankets.

The handmade sewed, quilted, knitted, crocheted and fleece blankets will be donated to organizations and facilities that provide children’s health-care services.

At the event, volunteers sewed Project Linus labels onto blankets that arrived in support of Make a Blanket Day.

“This was a good way to help others, especially children,” said Candace Robertson, a volunteer who has made about 500 blankets for the project over the years.

Robertson said, although the names of the quilter or sewer are removed from each blanket, any blanket given to a child with the organization’s label on it is as if she had sewn it, personally.

She recalled a time when she met a local mother who’d lost her child to a disease.

“She said she just wanted to say ‘thank you.’ … She lost her baby, but she was thankful for the quilt,” Robertson said.

The event also featured a raffle for a Janome sewing machine donated by Jim’s Vacuum and Sewing; member of Bay Point Women’s Club, Tampa Brooks, won the raffle.

The one-day event generated more blankets than ever, said Marianne Britton, the Bay County coordinator.

She also said for the entire year last year the group gave about 850 blankets to local organizations such as Anchorage Children’s Home and Gulf Coast Advocacy Center.

Volunteers meet four times a year and regularly donate blankets to local groups as well as national organizations during disasters or traumatic events such as the shooting in Sandy Hook, Conn.

For more information about Project Linus, contact Britton at 271-2478 or blankets4kids@hotmail.com.

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